tedium's Archives

I realized I had not posted an update about my employment situation in some time. I have a job now. It’s a contract position for a company called Premier Retail Networks, in San Francisco. It’s a division of Technicolor (Thomson) with I guess about 250 people. The company provides services for retailers who wish to advertise products on video screens in their stores. Content compression, editing, distribution, the screens themselves, the whole bit. If you see one of these screens (and it doesn’t have a DVD player attached, we don’t use those) it’s probably us. But it’s an odd signpost in my career.

My early professional career started with the VideoVision card, enabling your computer to capture video and enabling you to send your computer monitor out to a TV screen. It was one of the early entries at both, and and it was the best. Then I worked on the VideoVision Studio upgrade, a JPEG add-on that allowed it to do full-motion full-quality video on a desktop Mac (with a stonking huge, fast disk array). This was really cool. The first one to do this on the desktop threw away a field (an important part of the video that makes the motion smooth — and represents half the image data) and compressed the daylights out of what was left; ours could ease up on the compression if your disk was faster so someone with a good system could compete with the big editing and post houses. This enabled a cottage industry of independent professionals to spring up, and I was proud of the role I played in that.

Then DV came along and I got involved in software codecs, and enabled ordinary humans to edit videos without elaborate systems. This was also fantastic. Oh, and while I was there I did some really good work at learning how to represent a company online, and designed Radius’ first public-facing site and loaded it with real information that really helped people get the most out of these systems.

From there I went to Adobe, to the Premiere team, where I continued to make sure that products changed the technological landscape for content creation. I added a lot of innovation around metadata interoperability that will enable people to get the most out of the media they create. I went to the Scene7 group, a service at Adobe which enabled small companies to have sophisticated imagery and video on their Web sites without the massive infrastructure costs and complexities of actually hosting it themselves.

And now, I’m at PRN. What am I enabling here? In-store advertising. I’m not enabling anything, really. I’m not delivering power to people. I’m not changing the world.

It’s taking some getting used to.

There might be opportunities for real innovation; I see some already. But I need to accept that I AM IN ADVERTISING.

I’ve resolved to eat my way through our the freezer in the garage. This has been a big bone of contention between my wife and I. She’s convinced anything over about 3 months old in the freezer is “freezerburnt and nasty” and I have a difficult time getting her to prepare it. We end up throwing a lot of stuff away and it makes me insane.

So, between my new (ahem) flexibility in schedule and the need to conserve money, I’ve begun to cook it myself. Starting with breakfasts, mostly. I have a lot to learn. Like — I have to plan ahead! Stuff has to thaw. That’s why, yesterday morning, I ended up cooking those kinda crummy meatless sausages; they don’t need to thaw. But hey — they got et. Check! I tried to cook eggs at the same time. I’m not really ready for that; it’s kind of hectic and I didn’t get to give the eggs the loving attention I usually like to — lots of fussing and adding spices etc. — but I got it done and we both ate it, it was OK.

Today I got the mango sausages from Trader Joe’s, which went considerably better. I didn’t try to cook them at the same time as anything. Later I cooked an egg and toasted an english muffin and added a slice of Havarti cheese and made myself a breakfast muffin.

Shosh identified the trend and got me some things I’ll need at the grocery store, which was pretty nice. But I’m going through a lot of pans now so I kind of have to wash them right away since we don’t run the dishwasher that often. The sucky part is that it’s easy for me to get distracted and forget to come back and do so after everything’s cool enough.

Distracted, for example, by my MP3 server.

I’m using it more often too, now; it’s on an Iomega Home Media Network Drive which can serve music via DLNA and iTunes, so in theory my computers, my living room receiver (an Onkyo TX-NR906), and even my TV (!) (an Samsung LN40B650 1080p LCD) can play music from it directly. And during my time off in October I used features in my Airport Express and my receiver, allowing me to route iTunes output to the living room stereo and, by extension, the speakers in my wife’s studio (I LOVE finally using the just-in-case wiring I put into my walls during the remodel). I’m approaching nerdvana, right?

Well, there was one hitch.The server had indexed like 80,000 songs, so whenever I chose that server it would take like FOUR minutes (literally) to load the library. And I quickly discovered that you can’t make playlists from shared servers. (@%$^$%*) Finally, a problem I’ve been dreading solving for a long time:

Duplicates!
My main folder has a lot of dupes from accidentally reripping, or consolidating libraries or whatever. Plus, that server hosts all my backups from various retired machines, iPods and (ahem) other peoples’ collections. (Like, 290GB worth!) So when I hit that server I’d have like 5 copies of Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones or whatever and each song would play 5 times in a row. Combined with the lack of playlisting, there was really nothing for it but to consolidate those libraries.

I guess I kept waiting for the software that would go by ID3 tag and neatly consolidate my libraries for me and eliminate duplicates. I tried a few Windows products that all sucked, and I didn’t see anything promising on the Mac. So I copied the server to a USB drive and sat and consolidated everything more or less by brute force. It sucked, and took forever. But I was really surprised at how much music I have, stuff I didn’t even know I had. Kind of exciting, actually.By the time I had finished I was down to 180GB. I suspect there are plenty more duplicates, so I’m going to go through it again, maybe using some of the organizational features in iTunes itself. But I’m already in vastly better shape.

I really like that I’m able to make music a part of my life again. It kind of fell by the wayside.

Again with the not going back to sleep after dropping Grey off. What a good boy am I. I came back and got to work, working the networks (of people) a bit. I got frustrated because I have so many collections of contact information with a mix of stale data. I guess I should sign up for Plaxo or something but I simply resolved to gather all that data in one place — my Mac Address Book. I liked that you can sync it into the cloud with MobileMe, and subsequently onto my iPhone. Nice backup, nice accessibility, nice synchronization.

I had recently, at long last, found the data cable for my old Samsung phone so i could suck all the contacts off of it. So I finally sat down and consolidated all that stuff once and for all. Up to the cloud it went, down to my phone it didn’t. I have noidea why. MobileMe could find my phone via GPS, and the options were all turned on, and I tried syncing from the system prefs and updating from the MobileMe web site. No dice.

And when I headed downtown to conduct some business at the Adobe offices, the guy I called had left his cel phone in his trunk. So I was stuck in the lobby, still smarting from the mild humiliation of the guy at the parking garage booth calling his manager to see if it was OK to let me in the building, and I could not find anyone in my phone list who was actually in the building at the time. They were in the master phonelist in MobileMe, but Apple does not allow you to log into that site from the iPhone, insisting resolutely that there is no need as everything is synchronized.

I was there in the lobby for almost 40 minutes before I managed to get upstairs.

On the bright side I saw a buddy from another product team who said there were “rumblings” about needing some extra help on a product I like and know very well, so that could be cool. I guess that’s why the universe stuck me in that lobby for all that time.

After Adobe I went to Fry’s to return a barbequeued USB hub. I wonder if plugging all those drives into it fried it? In any case I got a different one that works very well. While I was there I surveyed the computer training books aisle, rows of books with titles like “ASP.NET for Dummies,” and I was awestruck by all the stuff I don’t know. I’m going to have to focus the scope of my retraining a little.

So I guess it was mostly a down day. Not without its highlights, but it was the first really hard day emotionally for me since the day I got sacked.

Today was spent mostly wrestling with technical problems in the computers at the house, especially Shoshanah’s iMac which has been kernel-panicking routinely. I wiped the internal drive, reinstalled Snow Leopard and copied the data from a backup on an external drive. It SEEMS to be stable now but we’ll see.

I’m sure glad for Time Machine, though restoring a half terabyte over a network took 12 hours when I did it Friday, and connected via USB it still took like 5 hours. >whew!< But now Time Machine is complaining that my server volume isn’t big enough. I think it no longer recognizes what’s already there? Not sure. More housecleaning to do.

I upgraded the firmware in my Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive to v1.0.40 and mostly it’s a step backward. The media shows up in iTunes but with 57,000-odd files it takes four minutes for the list to appear. There are many duplicates so I cn’t usually just hit Play, and I can’t manage the duplicates from within iTunes on a shared server. And I can’t make playlists either. So in the end: Not useful. In the meantime the permissions control now works backwards: Each share point is set to “Everyone” by default, and there’s a list of users you grant access to — which is weird. And when you choose a user, it gets set to “Secure”, which makes sense, but then the list of users disappears, which does not. But it doesn’t matter because now all my Macs only see a “backup” share and none of the other shares regardless of setting or how they’re connected. If I log in it offers another share named for the user but that mostly can’t be accessed when you click on it. The BitTorrent feature doesn’t work at all and according to the user forums it never has. They added a new feature with a new release for automatically resizing photos or some shit but pulled it because that feature didn’t work right — the few who got to it in time were outraged that it didn’t fix the torrent thing. The ftp server feature thinks it’s working but the connection keeps being refused. I’ve routed all inbound ftp requests to the server in my firewall. Still could be a configuration issue, but as upgrade features go I’m 0 for 5. Monday I’ll try to figure out how to downgrade the firmware.

I cleaned up the kitchen Mac of bloat and got it backed up; it’s sort of my development machine for the moment, with all my Web development, Flex Builder and so on on it. I need to get that on a separate machine since it’s supposed to be a family machine. I’ll do that when I get the office sorted out.

I’m plowing through various external drives and consolidating data. I’ve deleted hundreds of gigabytes of Adobe stuff, chiefly test movies. That felt pretty good. Bummer for my friends still at Adobe but that’s the way it goes. They can make more test movies I’m sure. I have a lot of partitions that aren’t the right size or format for what I need them to be so I have to keep moving data around so that I can wipe the drives. The ones where I used a Master Boot Record can’t be resized or anything, got to start fresh. Basically trying to wrangle my backup and archive space has been feeling like scooping up mercury. But I’ll get there.

I’m experimenting with the beta of Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst. Right now I’m distracted by FB4′s support for PHP, that’s pretty fun. I’m making a Flex-based admin browser for osCommerce. I’ll let you know how it goes. I think an admin console for osCommerce might be a nice portfolio piece.

I got DreamWeaver set up to edit all of the sites I’m managing. Synchronizing took a long time mostly because of all the copies of the HannahGrey server I have — ZenCart versions, staging versions, backup versions etc.

I also sucked down all the content from a hosting service I don’t use any more. Now I think I can kill it, which will save $100 a year. Not much but hey it’s something.

Hopefully this is the most boring blog post I will ever write. And the most boring weekend I will ever have.

Managed not to waste the day again today. Got up before 8, got the kid to school, did NOT go back to bed. Managed a whole bunch of relevant stuff to future livelihoods.

Idiot plumber flaked out again today. My brother did not flake out, came over and spent a few hours first with my son and then with me working on some income-generating ideas.

I helped out my electrician friend by seizing control of his orphaned domain name (url on the side of his truck 403′s); I’ll help him build his website back up and I’ll be a consultant on low-voltage (networking, audio, video) issues for his business.

I also discovered that one of my hosting accounts had NO domains pointing to it. Got that cleared up now. I unpacked several of the boxes from my office, a peculiar sort of humiliation. And once again faced the stress of not having places for things. A lot of this stuff went to my office BECAUSE I didn’t have places for them in my home. But I really needed some of the books and documents in there.

Finished off setting up a Squid cache proxy server on my virtual dedicated server so Elisa can watch TV in Italy on services that check for domestic IP’s. Gordon did the vast majority of the work, for which I’m grateful. I just had to create some user accounts, test it a bit, and pull reports to make sure it was all working. abc.com doesn’t think much of it (black screen with a simple error message reading “ERROR” appears in red) but it works OK with Hulu.

Started reviewing the termination packet from Adobe. The outplacement service appears to be completely worthless. They review your resume, and you can use their fax machines and stuff, and that’s about it. They don’t actually help you find a job. I wonder how much that cost Adobe? Would it cost as much as, say, a subscription to lynda.com so that I can get some tech training that might actually help me land a new gig? I’m actually going to bring that up with them.

My mjenning@adobe.com email is now bouncing but I can’t seem to get them to at least put my new address in the bounce message, much less forward emails. God that’s annoying. That is going to bite me in the ass for years. That’s easily the worst part of losing my job there.

The weird thing is that I am technically an employee for two more months but I’m cut off from everything. I went down there to have a few beers with my colleagues tonight and I had to use the visitor entrance, get the escort, the whole bit. While there I tried to order software but I’m locked out of that too. I’m still eligible to buy it but now I have to use (shudder) a paper order form. Sheesh.

So here’s a weird thing. I went to an event last night downtown called Dr. Sketchy’s (I’ll do a separate post on that) where I had the opportunity to draw some of MY kind of life drawing models. Afterward I went to talk to the models and the host. They were perfectly nice to me, sweet and encouraging. Couldn’t have been friendlier. But I had a really hard time just being Mike Jennings, some balding schlub who can’t draw. It wasn’t long before I dragged my relationship to Adobe into the conversation, and I realized that it was completely unnecessary, the conversation would not have been any different if I hadn’t said anything.

Shortly after my ten-year anniversary with Adobe Systems I got booted in a RIF that wiped out some 680 employees. As I posted on my Facebook profile:

I was supposed to get laid off in LAST December’s Adobe bloodbath, but my director cadged a stay of execution that bought me another year. During which I developed some really interesting new skills. Cashing out PTO/sabbatical won’t suck. While it’s not a great severance package, it IS a severance package. I get to say I’m technically still an Adobe employee for a couple more months which will help me refinance my home. While I’ll have to pay for my healthcare, at least I don’t have to shop for it and hope I can get it at ALL. My compatriots on the Premiere team (now and previously) have all offered all kinds of support, as have many others, and it may help me get a new job. The bill to extend unemployment benefits passed. I hadn’t finished what I wanted to do in October, now I’ll have time for that. My wife’s Web sites need some attention, now I’ll have time for that too.

And I can make sure the house is in shape for our first goddamn party since we moved in here!

So it’s Day 1 of my pseudoemployment (technically I’m employed for two more months but cut off from Adobe resources — vpn, email, network etc.). I woke up thinking “What should I do today?” I have lots of traditional options:

Resume drinking

Watch an entire season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Masturbate

Go see a movie

Sleep

Start finding a job

I opted for a combination of the last two. It took a while to find my resumé on ten years of accumulated hard drives, but I did it and now I’m faced with summarizing a decade of being kind of technologically all over the place. I hate my resume format but it’s compatible with distribution as .doc, .pdf and .html which seems valuable. I dunno. Thoughts? Anyway, I also spent a ton of time updating LinkedIn and Facebook, of course, and trying to remove references to my Adobe email from important sites like banks and PayPal (since my email is now pretty much routed to dev/null — it doesn’t bounce but I don’t get it either). I slept more than I should, and spent a lot of time talking with well-wishers. But in general I think I really need to apply a work ethic to unemployment. We’re at, what, 12% around here?

When the Daily show was doing a bit that compared the 2008 Republican National Convention to the Superdome during Katrina, one scene showed Jason Jones with a handkerchief pressed over his nose and mouth. “I’m here in the print media center… the stench of death is overwhelming…” This kind of got me thinking about the fate of the newspapers, which is unsurprisingly a favorite topic in the news lately. And last night, the Daily Show’s guest was hawking a book in which he claims to be able to save newspapers through schemes like micropayments.

Why I love newspapers:

The feel. The tactile experience of going through the paper. While I don’t smoke or drink coffee, I totally get the idea of the newspaper as being a brilliant part of that hallowed morning ritual.

You feel less dorky taking them into the can with you. You never want anyone to know you’ve brought your laptop into te only place where it’s actually used on your lap.

Regional reporting. ‘Nuff said.

Editors. This is what conventional media in general is hanging onto for dear life, and it’s a good one. For example, an editor would make me actually read this guy’s book before dismissing it out of hand. Fact-checking, editorial review, and so on, the machinery of the Gatekeepers of News Reporting, really are wonderful things in most cases. I will miss the sometimes erroneous assurance that the story has been vetted and it really worth reading at face value. (Side note: If we could harness misinformation in some way, we coud make travel to disant planets a reality. Not even light moves faster than bogus facts on the internet.)

Community. This is one of those tings that one doesn’t really value until one loses it. But reading the Letters page and knowing that these people are in my community and therefore have some degree of relevance and even credibility is an experience I just don’t get on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m part of many strong internet-based communities and I enjoy them very much. But there really is something to be said for a central place to discuss issues with people you may actually see in person at some point.

Newspaper as an Artifact. While a new breed of archaeology is emerging out of data mining in search engines and the Internet Archive wayback-machine for recent historical information, the newspapers remain a tangible artifact of the past, reflecting so much more than just the actual content of the news article. Visual aesthetics of illustration, layout and typography of the day, the ephemeral advertisements and so on make newspapers a unique and valuable key to understanding the past in a way that is much harder for the pure-information approach to archiving news items, stripping out the ephemeral “wastes of bandwidth”.

Now for what I won’t miss about newspapers:

The mess. As soon as I get the rubberband off, the thing seems to explode in an oversized confetti of individual sheets coering all horizontal surfaces. I don’t know how this happens but it’s always been like that for me.

The newsprint ink. Last night, Jon Stewart suggested that newspapers could be saved by impregnating the ink with a highly addictive narcotic substance. Great.

Classified Ads. We’ll be explaining to our chilren in the very near future that we “paid by the line” for “text-only ads” and had to invent a byzantine language of abbreviations just to get one ad in a non-searchable format for just one week. Good riddance. That was stupid even then, but we just had to wait for a sensible alternative to arrive in the format of the Internet, and Craigslist in particular.

The suspicion that unseen forces are manipulating what is and isn’t seen in the paper. Traditional media has tried to paint citizen journalismin the colors of conspiracy theorists but the undeniable fact is that by decentralizing control of the media you throw off the constraints imposed by those who would like to control it. Did you know, for example, that there was a time when what the Chinese government said about what’s going on in its country actually had credibility? Now the media only repeats what the Chinese government says partly out of perfunctory courtesy and partly as an amusing and pathetic counterpoint to what is clearly really happening.

Paying for it. Sorry, Mr. Walter Isaacson, I won’t pay for the news. I know it’s not fair but I still won’t. The iTunes model of minipayments breaks down because (as Stewart immediately pointed out) the song you can enjoy over and over again but the news is ephemeral almost by definition. I will simply use less trustworthy information sources that are free. I will even aggregate the same news items from several untrustworthy sources and triangulate the real story from there rather than subscribe to a trusted source. Even if you could get the toothpaste back into the tube, it’s a leaky tube. You could never prevent the free spread of information; you never had a chance.

Not being in control of the collection of stories. I like being able to effectively build my own newspaper from the stories I’m interested in through RSS.

Regurgitated Reuters and AP stories. Both fine institutions but it always felt like a copout to me. Knowing that I could read virtually the same article in any newspaper devalued mine.

Censorship. Never cared for it much. I have an 18-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son and I cringe knowing what they have easy access to, and I still don’t much believe in censorship. I understand why other parents want it, but I don’t believe in regional community standards and I still believe that information wants to be free, and trying to censor it is just a giant game of whack-a-mole that just makes the censored information more attractive and leaves you looking as pathetic as a Chinese news outlet.

Lowest Common Denominator. Lame-ass human interest stories are legion, more now than ever before, and especially in TV media. The more time Nancy Grace spends ranting about an “issue” the less interesting and relevant it is to me. But I still think of it as the newspapers’ fault. (I still can’t get over the ancient Bloom County in which the harried, weak-willed newspaper editor was helpless to resist Milo’s clichéd human interest stories: “RUN THAT BABY!!!”. Apparently, I’m not alone.)

The Sports section. Never had any use for it. It was always in my way, and now it isn’t.

But the news isn’t all bad for the papers. I predict that the pendulum will swing back, though the Coriolis Effect of the changing face of media consumption will propel it along a slightly (okay, radically) different path.

People will begin to miss regional reporting and the sense of community that comes with it.

They will get tired of trying to collage many free but untrustworthy news sources to get a sense of the real picture.

They will begin to distinguish articles that actually have a monetary value to them, and understand the value of paying for critical information (example: Expensive industrial trade reports today.)

They will find themselves siloed by their own control of the media. For example, I will continue to read only stories about technology, science, or whatever else I think to put into my RSS feeds, and eventually realize the value of having completely unrelated but occasionally interesting articles thrown in with the stuff I know I will care about.

With luck, the print media will learn to evolve in ways that take these effects into account. Unfortunately I still don’t think they’re ever gonna reclaim the prized 18-24 demo, and maybe an even broader range than that; a few of the things I’ve mentioned are only valued by (let’s face it) old people.

Are you one of my friends or family members who has been taken aback by my sudden and uncharacteristic political activism? You aren’t alone. A friend asked why, and here was my answer, political incorrectitudes and all. (Well, I censored one name in order not to shame the guilty.)

Dear J—:

It shouldn’t surprise you that this would hit such a nerve in me. This summer I damaged my most important friendship in 2008 in defense of my views on individual marriage freedoms. Anyone who has written their own marriage vows should understand that marriage is an individual commitment and the parameters should never be dictated by anyone else, much less written into a document designed to run a government. (It’s not a fucking opinion poll, it’s the Constitution.)

Discrimination and the imposition of religious beliefs as law are both deeply un-American — exactly what the pilgrims came here to escape, exactly what Jefferson and the founding fathers were trying to prevent, and exactly what we’re fighting against in the middle east. You can never give the Religious Right an inch — they’ll take a mile, every time, and land us in deeply hypocritical territory, every time.

I’m embarrassed. California has a reputation for being progressive, and I’ve always been comfortable being a bit smug and elitist about that. And, well… yeah.

And yes, I’m angry. I’m infuriated that the black community could not see past their historic social conservatism to recognize Prop 8 as the exact same laws they needed to overturn in order to marry who they want. I’m enraged by the sleazy lies the Church propagated in order to gain support for it, and for the interference of out-of-state churches. And for the hypocrisy of the Mormon church. I’m angry at people like my friend J—- S——- who would have voted with me but has a longstanding refusal to vote.

This invalidates many arguments concerning the legislation of morality (Prop 8, for example) and other social legislation issues like the teaching of creationism in schools, or the inclusion of religion in the Flag Salute.

I am not against religion. But I just want everyone to be clear on a few things. America was founded by people fleeing the imposition of a religion at odds with their personal beliefs. The Constitution was intentionally designed to protect individual freedom of religion. We may be a predominantly Christian nation, but to impose those beliefs as a matter of law is expressly un-American, and is the exact behavior of the peoples with whom we are currently at war — and why we’re still at war with them.

We are a nation of many religions, founded on a principle of personal freedom and freedom of religion, and freedom from religious persecution. To justify the passage of laws that persecute people whose beliefs or lifestyles are at odds with your own is just religious extremism, and given how this country was founded, it is the most un-American thing a citizen can do.

Originally uploaded by Modofly
Going from a series of art retreats to the daily grind of work and starting the kid’s new school year has created a bit of cognitive dissonance in my family. Since we instituted our weekly Art Night, we sit down each Thursday night to work on some art project or other. You can smell the gears grind as we disconnect from our PTA/worker-bee selves and try to reconnect to where we were when we weren’t doing anything BUT art.

It really doesn’t work very well.

The only successful Art Nights I’ve had are the ones where I spent the previous evenings preparing — gessoing, sanding, gluing, annealing, whatever needs to happen before the composition and assembly can begin — thereby just keeping myself in the artistic mentality on a constant basis.

But when I maintain that sort of artistic headspace, it makes it very hard to take workaday concerns like housework, job and school seriously. It makes trying to be a good, “normal” dad when I’m on school property nearly impossible; I am certain everyone can see my tentacles showing. In many ways it’s worse at work, where I work on creative software tools. Go ahead, just try testing metadata support against a matrix of file formats when all you want to do is play creatively with the tools you’re testing.

Does anyone with more experience than me in keeping these worlds parallel but separate have any suggestions? Or at least predictions for the future?